When comparing OpenRC vs runit, the Slant community recommends OpenRC for most people. In the question“What are the best Linux init systems?”OpenRC is ranked 1st while runit is ranked 2nd. The most important reason people chose OpenRC is:

OpenRC follows the UNIX philosophy of 'do one thing and do it well', while it's true that it has more features than sysvinit, it does not stay away from its primary function with unnecessary added features.

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Pros

Pro

No feature creep

OpenRC follows the UNIX philosophy of 'do one thing and do it well', while it's true that it has more features than sysvinit, it does not stay away from its primary function with unnecessary added features.

Pro

Fast

OpenRC builds on top of sysvinit and adds some more useful features (like parallel booting) while still the simplicity that sysvinit is know for. Because of this it generally boots faster than other init systems, especially when parallel booting is enabled.

Pro

Extremely simple

All configuration is done via shell scripts and symlinks. Shell scripts can then use various specialized utilities to ease the development of init scripts.

Pro

A very balanced compromise

Basically OpenRC doesn't replace SysV init, but rather works with it, providing features that SysV is lacking while taking advantage of its benefits. It's also used by a fair amount of reasonably popular distros and is well supported and developed.

Pro

Less dependency creep

Using OpenRC does not lock in a distribution by providing specific NON-POSIX extra services which programs then would rely on.

Pro

Fast, parallel startup

After the system's one time tasks (stage 1) are done, the system services are started up in parallel. The operating system's process scheduler takes care of having the services available as soon as possible.

Pro

Small and unix-like

One of the runit project's principles is to keep the code size small. As of version 1.0.0 of runit, the runit.c source contains 330 lines of code; the runsvdir.c source is 274 lines of code, the runsv.c source 509. This minimizes the possibility of bugs introduced by programmer's fault, and makes it more easy for security related people to proofread the source code.The runit core programs have a very small memory footprint and do not allocate memory dynamically.

Pro

Easy to use

Simple scripts linked to the proper directory is all that's needed to bring a service up at boot, and everything is up and running quickly.

Cons

Con

No socket activation

OpenRC does not have socket activation yet. It will be added in the future though.